


Air

by thinskinnedcalciumsipper



Category: Team Fortress 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 11:51:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2347496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinskinnedcalciumsipper/pseuds/thinskinnedcalciumsipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the medic fosters a monster</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. eau

Parts of the doctor replied to the sound before the doctor himself consciously heard it; perhaps the secret shrewish insides of the callyx of him recognized its smallness, its fey pitch and trembling tone, perhaps the man in the scientist felt an inkling of empathy for the source of that sound, which sounded so young.

Insomnia was common to intelligent men. The doctor sat up awake most nights past the strongly suggested curfew, keeping up in his reading, finishing reports or sitting beside the mournfully moaning record player and not remembering. He had overheard all natural nocturnal events before - nightmares escaping human mouths, scuffles in the dark, water moving, the occasional tryst - but he heard now a sound he could never have expected to hear - a sound so fine, so sweet - a sound very like a child singing, faint, far away, but he was certain he did hear it.

He stood. He had not yet undressed for bed. He stood in his door and put up his better ear - he did hear it, muffled and muted, a jubilant soprano as bright as lime morning light. It came from below his feet, in the guts of the building. Was it a recording? He recalled he owned the only gramophone on base.

He didn't really think he'd need it, but he folded back his sleeves and tucked a pistol into the waist of his slacks before closing his door. There were no locks there.

It was surreal, walking down the silent hall in the witching hour, past rows of faceless doors, through shrilly lit commons which seemed enormous by their vacancy and cryptlike quiet, approaching slowly a sound which shone like a beacon beneath the ground, which wobbled and warped, the doctor could hear now was a natural sound, almost imperceptibly off-tempo, punctuated with stutters, pauses and tending to repeat itself. The doctor descended.

Like the baby Moses, he found her in the water.

She must have been swimming. She was naked. Her body was dark, small, round and soft, drifting tummy-up in the bad brackish water which ran beneath the compound. Her eyes were enormous and utterly black, and they looked beyond him, unfocused, unseeing. He almost thought she was dead - but as he put his hand under her skull to draw her out, she touched his wrists and quietly laughed, how pretty, how sweet, her little robinlike laugh. She wouldn't speak to him.

It was a trifle to pick her up, to carry her - she was fat but so small, very light, and the doctor was not a waif. She didn't resist. She didn't seem in fact to notice. Now and then, she'd emit the beginnings of music, like a dove, the doctor thought, exactly like a little dove. The water she shed in the doctors shirt smelled bitter.

The doctor hit the infirmary light with his elbow and deposited the baby Moses very carefully on the boosted bed for examination, more carefully than he could recall treating a teammate. Her head rolled where it was placed as though she were dead, but a dead thing which blinked, sighed, hiccuped and hummed.

There were spots and scars, planes and pockets of puckered pale tissue on her arms, her back, her stomach and her calves, which were wonderfully slender and delicate, her lovely little ballerina feet the doctor could not stop looking at. Her toenails were a little long, the color of seashells. The doctor held one in his hand as easily as he held a scalpel, so light were they, so small, so small, so small, so small.

He put his arm around her to make her sit up. Her flesh felt chill, still, from her swim, but not dangerously so. Her internal temperature was ordinary. Her heart hummed hardily in her breast, her breath constant as the sough of the sea. Her legs leapt when he tapped her knee and her pupils contracted when he passed a light over them.

The down of her pubis was too dense for her to be very young, but the virgin space behind her molars told the doctor her wonderful little voice did not betray her. Her genitals, the doctor saw, were aberrant, protuberant.

When she looked at him - and the doctor was so alarmed when he noticed it the light fell from his hand with a clatter - with a dove roosted on her shoulder, rooting in her hair, she looked like an angel. She smiled.

"Hello," said the doctor, and her smiled broadened, but she did not reply.

"Hello," said the doctor, again, respectfully pulling the sheet of the infirmary cot over her shoulders where she let it lay with utter disinterest, "do you know where you are?"

"By the rivers of Babylon," she cooed, her sound like cherry snow cones, "where we lay down - and there we wept when we remembered Zion," and her enormous black eyes fluttered shut, and in the doctors arms like an infant she fell immediately asleep.

The doctor looked at her a long time, the girl-thing drawn out of the underground river sleeping sweetly where he put her down, feeling drunk, feeling finally the enormity of his astonishment at her. It was certainly six in the morning.

He sat, his posture unraveling, hands hanging between his knees. He put aside the pistol on the tray of arranged surgical instruments. He realized he still wore his tie, so he untied it, folded it and put it down beside the pistol.

"Ah," said she in her sleep, and the doctor shed his glove, touched her cheek with his naked knuckle, and she was calm.


	2. terre

Coming from the farm, the engineer was an early riser, naturally - with his patient nature and comradely kind feeling for the medic, he was not livid at being disturbed, at being so brusquely instructed to dress and appear so early, and during ceasefire, but he wasn't exactly pleased.

"I need to sleep," the doctor explained, but the explanation was like a plea, and he urged the engineer along the quarters hall with uncharacteristic haste, "just watch her. I can't be sure how she'll behave."

"Who?," said the engineer, stupidly, still buttoning his shirt, still a little asleep.

"She seems completely healthy. Physically. Just sit with her. She wouldn't speak to me," the medic slipped his fingers past his spectacles to massage the bridge of his nose and ushered the engineer in the dimly lit infirmary door."Just sit with her. I don't know what's to be done. I need sleep."

The engineer self-indulgently applied his knuckles to his weary eyes, sitting without invitation in the vacant chair he saw slowly turning alone at the center of the hard white room, alone in the drowsy static of the purposelessly meandering gramophone and murmuring electric light, and he saw then something in the cot, something covered - someone - a bottom, small breasts slowly rose and fell, and he leapt up.

"Doc, what the hell?" he exclaimed, but looking around, he saw the doctor had gone.

"What the hell?" he repeated, looking out the door and seeing only the hollow hall. He touched his own temple in bewilderment. He realized he was speaking much too loud, and despite himself, he reddened.

The person in the cot, whose face was turned away from the engineer, did not stir. They seemed to sleep still. The engineer saw with sickening astonishment that they were a stranger, and that they were very young, dark, and that they were naked beneath the thin sheet.

The engineer tried not to look at the person after observing that.

He pushed the chair to the desk with his back to the cot and for a while, flushed and profoundly uncomfortable with his hands folded chastely in his lap, thumbs conversing, he internally explored the surreality of the situation - the phantasmagoria.

He picked at the medics books, dense tomes on topics like branches of biology sufficiently obscure and strange to border on mythological, which interested him not at all.

In the buffered quiet of the room, the planet of quiet of the early morning he could hear clearly the elfin breaths which were not his own. As he looked at the dense German a sigh rattled that quiet, and it alarmed him so he spun around to see the faunish visage of the cherub in the cot, a face he found somehow familiar. Touching his heart, he stared hard at it, uncomfortably aware of the ebb and flow of its little breasts beneath the blanket. They were very small - the little breasts - why, it was just a little child.

He didn't understand how a stranger had come to this ground - he didn't understand a child in this context, its smallness, its newness, its grotesque weakness. It made a man want to cry.

Unthinking, he put out his hand to pat the thing in the cots cheek, and suddenly, it saw him.

"Hey," said the engineer, very gently. It only lent him its graven look. It did not shy from his touch, but respectfully, he withdrew it.

"Hey there," he repeated, leaning in on his knee and putting on a friendly face, for he thought it looked a little frightened. The child hesitated, but it did reply in time, though slowly, uncertainly, with an uncertain smile.

"What's your name?" he requested, but it didn't speak.

"Now, how the heck did you get in here?" he said, but it didn't speak.

"Do you speak?," the engineer persisted, though gently, but it only looked at him, its enormous and inscrutable oil-black eyes which the engineer thought were kind of pretty.

"That's fine," the engineer consoled it, and its hands, which were large and puppyish, the color of fine and fertile soil, laying like stones on its plump stomach, he put his over. It tolerated his touch.

"That's fine," the engineer said, "you don't have to speak to me if you don't want. Mind if I sit a spell with you?"

The dimpled, dappled, beaming smile the engineer was granted caught him off guard. It was pretty. It was, undeniably, a pretty little child, a lovable child, the engineer thought, it must be soft-spoken and sweet - like he was as a little boy.

"How in Sam Hill did you get in here?" he wondered aloud to himself, and chuckled as the kid turned over his hand in its curiously, considered the abrupt end of his wrist.

"It doesn't bother you, does it?," the engineer asked it considerately, and it looked at him like it couldn't understand him, but the kind and quiet qualities of his voice visibly pleased it. It now held his only hand to its ribs like a dearly loved stuffed animal and to him, it made an experimental syllable which surprised the engineer with its depth and warmth.

He chuckled, but even so, he drew up the sheet a little further up, up to its chin. It wasn't right to see a little child that way.

"Wish I had a little dress for you," he began to say, but alighted on the doctors coats which hung, immaculately pressed, in a row on hooks by the door.


	3. feu

The spy knew the animal, though he wore human skin and girlish curls and a crude cotton frock he imagined the laborer had composed himself - the doting fool, the bleeding heart - though he wore not the rubber, roar and flame he bore in life, the spy was a rare kind that could not be deceived, and the spy saw what he was.

Like a priest waiting on the penitent, the spy stood aside as his acquaintances doted over him; stood aside for his unpalatable antics, the hiccups and baby talk, the Kewpie doll clumsiness, the little falsetto songs which nearly caused the stupid laborer to swoon; the spy stood aside for their ridiculous discussion of what was to be done with him, inform the administration or the civilian authority? Usher it out under the cover of night? Keep it in secret, like a contraband cat? the spy had to smother the snicker in his throat, for he knew exactly what was to be done with him, and the spy expected no one to be able to do it but he.

When the thing was fed and tidied, examined again by the doctor (whose softness surprised and disappointed the spy,) when he was at last left alone while the engineer slept and the doctor (the spy assumed) rendezvoused with his beau, the spy entered in the face of the engineer - dunce, boor, provincial lout, friend of rabid dogs - with his fingers on his knife in his pocket, he approached the thing in the cot, tipped the hat he was not wearing, and when he parted his lips, the engineers voice said:

"Hello."

The animal sat up abruptly. His face, like his protuberant stomach, was ill-formed, soft and degenerate. His feet, folded beneath him, were very small, his hands large and doltish, and they clasped tightly to some ridiculous moppet the spy recognized as one of the laborer's disturbing idiosyncrasies - a stuffed bear wearing a hideous yellow cap. The things eyes, saw the spy with a sick inward lurch, were very large, very black, black as coal, black as smoke, black as ash.

He had hoped he would be - if not asleep, the spy did not hope for so much in his marks - but in one of his dazes, the fugues the spy had seen him slip into where he spoke to specters and plucked somethings from thin air.

The burned thing shook the doll, considered it, arranged it carefully in his lap, looked at the spy, and grinned hideously.

Unseen, his knife slipped like a snake from the spys pocket pocket and slithered behind his back.

Like a baby, the thing put out his hands to him, and the spy crept forward. He put his hand on the spys hip, the spys arm. He embraced him, his yielding pockmarked cheek spreading on the spys stomach, and the knife spun open, fangs bared.

With rapidity that stunned the spy the burned thing kicked; the spys knife marked the soft pinkish flesh of the foot as it flew away, clattering in a remote corner of the room; his long nails cut the spys wrist, his eyes which were enormous opened very wide, consumed by pupil, ugly new moons, his mouth opened also, opened at impossible velocity, to an impossible diameter, the plume of spittle, the fetid breath, the snaggle of teeth, the raw scarlet gullet, the wheezing smoke-hoarse scream of insensate fury the spy knew very well, very well.

On the cot which creaked as though they fucked, they fought, fists and heels of feet, and though the thing was unarmed, he was the thing the spy reviled, that thing without sense, without self-preservation, the thing which consumed without prejudice, like a fire; his inconquerable defense was something he carried in his very person, something that could not be kicked from his hand.

The burned thing found the spys wrist in the struggle and bit it and the spy felt his long crooked teeth penetrate to the bones; the spy dragged it back, felt the horrible teeth yield a little, but with them went a furrow of flesh. Blood poured out of him, filled in an instant the sleeve of his fine shirt.

The spy stood to look at it, only for an instant, just an instant, he looked with astonishment as the poppy which bloomed from him, and then his opponent had found his throat, and he descended, his skull cracking sickeningly on the tiled floor where he was thrown, a rib audibly breaking as the thing leapt on him, leaned all his weight and wrath on the spys windpipe, and the spy knew he had lost.

He saw the thing he hated in the blurry, brilliant dream which fell across him then, feeling the contents of his skull pulping and purpling, saw the thing pulling ropes of flesh, hand over hand, like he descended into him - saw the hungers which lit his inscrutably black eyes - saw as though from a great distance the minute star of white-hot flame twinkle to life - saw distantly, though perhaps he only imagined them, the horrified faces of his acquaintances, the bumble of muttering becoming dismayed exclamations becoming screaming, but it was so thin, this fleeting vision, insubstantial as heat ripples

and the spy thought, he really was a sorry thing, a wretched thing, and the spy admitted to himself in the moment he slipped out of this world pregnant with a pyre, he felt sad for the sorry thing, the wretched thing, the thing which could not die.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n sorry about this lmao i know its weird..............its based off this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z2W9XruH_M very pretty song btw


End file.
